"anomalous" higher voter turnout in Jefferson County, in which census data shows 43% of the population is black. He called the county's 47% voter turnout as "highly unusual" and questioned the integrity of its election results.
...“self-styled evangelicals” risked bringing the word evangelical into disrepute, and added there was no justification for Christians contradicting God’s teaching to protect the poor and the weak.Bayes' analysis of the sad state of American fundamentalism likely offers nothing new to those of us unfortunate enough to be cursed with regular media exposure to the unhinged religious who cavort with and lustily endorse the Orange Ogre. However, he does everyone a service by reminding us of how debased they really are:
Bayes told the Guardian: “Some of the things that have been said by religious leaders seem to collude with a system that marginalises the poor, a system which builds walls instead of bridges, a system which says people on the margins of society should be excluded, a system which says we’re not welcoming people any more into our country.
“Some quite significant so-called evangelical leaders are uncritically supporting people in ways that imply they are colluding or playing down the seriousness of things which in other parts of their lives [they] would see as really important,” Bayes added.Bayes is not alone in his astonishment and reprobation:
Last month, Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, said he could not comprehend the strength of support for Trump among conservative evangelicals in the US. “I really genuinely do not understand where that is coming from,” he told ITV’s Peston on Sunday programme.Both ecclesiastics have real cause for their concern:
In his Christmas Day sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, Welby criticised “populist leaders that deceive” their people, in comments interpreted as being aimed at Trump.
According to the Washington-based Pew Research Center, 80% of self-identified white evangelical Christians said they voted for Trump in the 2016 election, and three-quarters have since said they approve of his presidency.One hopes that neither Bayes nor other truly religious hold their breath on that one.
Bayes, who has been bishop of Liverpool since 2014, said: “If people want to support rightwing populism anywhere in the world, they are free to do so. The question is, how are they going to relate that to their Christian faith?
“And if what I believe are the clear teachings of the gospel about love for all, the desire for justice and for making sure marginalised and defenceless people are protected, if it looks as though those teachings are being contradicted, then I think there is a need to say so.”
Fossil fuel companies are among those who have ploughed more than $180bn since 2010 into new “cracking” facilities that will produce the raw material for everyday plastics from packaging to bottles, trays and cartons.The Guardian reports a shocking statistic that sets all of this into perspective: the amount of plastic produced in a year is roughly the same as the entire weight of humanity.
The new facilities – being built by corporations like Exxon Mobile Chemical and Shell Chemical – will help fuel a 40% rise in plastic production in the next decade, according to experts, exacerbating the plastic pollution crisis that scientist warn already risks “near permanent pollution of the earth.”
Greenpeace UK’s senior oceans campaigner Louise Edge said any increase in the amount of plastic ending up in the oceans would have a disastrous impact.
“We are already producing more disposable plastic than we can deal with, more in the last decade than in the entire twentieth century, and millions of tonnes of it are ending up in our oceans.”
The huge investment in plastic production has been driven by the shale gas boom in the US. This has resulted in one of the raw materials used to produce plastic resin – natural gas liquids – dropping dramatically in price.That, of course, translates into even bigger profits for the corporate giants who fuel the industry.
Canada sits on its hands for UN vote, Harper, Dec. 22
Tim Harper’s excellent column about the UN vote denouncing the U.S. embassy move brings into sharp relief how badly our federal government is representing Canada.
Instead of taking a principled stand and joining most other countries in condemning the move, Ottawa abstained from the vote to avoid annoying the Trump administration.
What makes this episode particularly pathetic is the contrast between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his father. When Pierre Trudeau was at the helm, he did not hesitate to set out positions diametrically opposed to Washington on international controversies like the Vietnam War and relations with Cuba.
This issue shows how far the apple has fallen from the tree.
Colin Languedoc, Toronto
Canada abstains on UN’s rebuke of Trump’s plan, Dec. 22
I was shocked that Canada chose to abstain from voting at the UN vote calling on the U.S. to withdraw its recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
As a Canadian, I was hoping for a better response from my Liberal government than what the previous Conservative government would likely have done.
Canada has prided itself in playing a more progressive and just role in the illegal usurpation of Palestinian lands by the state of Israel. But all that belongs to the good old days. The Liberal government appears to be more interested in appeasing U.S. President Donald Trump than doing the just and rightful thing.
With the UN vote, Canada could have demonstrated that it stands with the rest of the world in condemning this move. It is speculated that Canada did not vote because Trump threatened the U.S. would be watching.
However, just as Trump and his divisive administration were taking names, so was the rest of the world, including Canadians like me. And what I saw made me wonder how far Canada has deviated from our principled Canadian positions. I expected more from my Liberal government.
Mubashir Rizvi, Pickering
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley is throwing a party for all the countries who didn't vote against the United States on its controversial bid to recognize Jerusalem as the capital city of Israel — and Canada plans to attend.Given the cost to Canada's principles and reputation, I hope it is an exceptional party that Mr. Trudeau et al. feel is worth the heavy price of admission.
Canada ... was the only G7 nation beside the United States that did not vote to condemn the move by Trump.Sure looks like cowardice to me.
In Canada’s case, an abstention does send a message, because the Trudeau government, like the Stephen Harper government before it, has slavishly backed the U.S. in voting against UN resolutions perceived to be anti-Israel.
But overwhelmingly the message sent by an abstention was that Ottawa didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to take a stand, wished that this would just go away.
The ancillary promise is that, through green consumerism, we can reconcile perpetual growth with planetary survival. But a series of research papers reveal there is no significant difference between the ecological footprints of people who care and people who don’t. One recent article, published in the journal Environment and Behaviour, says those who identify themselves as conscious consumers use more energy and carbon than those who do not.How can that be, I asked myself. Monbiot has the answer:
Because environmental awareness tends to be higher among wealthy people. It is not attitudes that govern our impact on the planet but income. The richer we are, the bigger our footprint, regardless of our good intentions. Those who see themselves as green consumers, the research found, mainly focused on behaviours that had “relatively small benefits”.While I am hardly one of the wealthy Monbiot identifies, that last paragraph gets to the heart of the matter as it pertains to me. Air travel is the poster child for greenhouse gas emissions.
I know people who recycle meticulously, save their plastic bags, carefully measure the water in their kettles, then take their holidays in the Caribbean, cancelling any environmental savings a hundredfold. I’ve come to believe that the recycling licences their long-haul flights. It persuades people they’ve gone green, enabling them to overlook their greater impacts.
One round-trip flight from New York to Europe or to San Francisco creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person. The average American generates about 19 tons of carbon dioxide a year; the average European, 10.David Suzuki explains it this way:
Though air travel emissions now account for only about 5 percent of warming, that fraction is projected to rise significantly, since the volume of air travel is increasing much faster than gains in flight fuel efficiency.
...since 1990, CO2 emissions from international aviation have increased 83 per cent. The aviation industry is expanding rapidly in part due to regulatory and taxing policies that do not reflect the true environmental costs of flying. “Cheap” fares may turn out to be costly in terms of climate change.And even more alarmingly:
A special characteristic of aircraft emissions is that most of them are produced at cruising altitudes high in the atmosphere. Scientific studies have shown that these high-altitude emissions have a more harmful climate impact because they trigger a series of chemical reactions and atmospheric effects that have a net warming effect. The IPCC, for example, has estimated that the climate impact of aircraft is two to four times greater than the effect of their carbon dioxide emissions alone.In 2017 I had, in total, four air trips: two to Cuba (one last January and one at the start of December, one to England, and one to Edmonton, where my son lives).
